Mr. Speaker, I cannot imagine the hon. member saying that when he knows the record is that in the 1990s the Liberals slashed $25 billion in provincial transfers that affected health care, education and programs for low income Canadians. They took $50 billion from the EI fund and used it for their own pet political projects.
He says that we should be doing something for those who find themselves with low incomes. In fact, we have invested funds in that. We have made sure that transfers are not cut to the provinces. It is interesting that the Liberals had 13 years to do something about that and they did not.
The member for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour himself admitted the Liberals failed to help low income Canadians. He stated, “We didn't get to where we need to get”. His Liberal colleague from York Centre agreed, and when speaking about the Liberal record on poverty stated, “We didn't do as well as we would have wanted to do”. In fact, they did not get it done in 13 years. It was always if they might have done it, had they had another term. The fact is they did not do it.
The provinces are just now starting to recover from the infrastructure losses they experienced because of the cut in transfer payments.